The present invention relates to voice communications for supporting e-commerce. More particularly, the present invention relates to voice communications over the Internet.
The growth of the Internet, World Wide Web and their users has induced the development of numerous applications. Internet with the voice-over-IP (VOIP) technology has become a major network player in telecommunication. PC to PC Internet telephony, an Internet application, has certainly attracted a lot of attention recently. Internet telephony represents a generic technology and/or application which utilizes the Internet protocol to facilitate a low cost phone call using the Internet network. The most technical and business developments in Internet telephony are focused on serving the mass telephone user market. The technical inventions and solutions are centered around replacing existing telecommunication network with new gateways, switches and routers, hence more hardware oriented. The challenges facing these developments are therefore in (1) scaling the gateway cards, boards or machines to handle thousands of voice channels, (2) making reliable connection and switching device or gateway across geographically distributed different hardware systems to serve the mass users and (3) monitor and manage usage, tariff and billing for the mass users.
In addition to the telephone services application, voice over IP technology has been applied to the FAX application again by-passing inter-exchange carriers for lower costs. Voice over IP has also been applied to the traditional Call Centers to provide low-cost call back phone services. Voice over IP can also be integrated with other applications, such as video conference, electronic white board, and collaborative web page browsing on a common platform. A set of fundamental technologies such as H.323 protocol stack and CODEC have been used to support these new applications.
The above prior art are generally limited to PC to PC communication through Internet. When the end user extends a PC call to a POTS phone from Internet through PSTN, special hardware gateway infrastructure is required. Unfortunately, such hardware system and network infrastructure with special circuit boards are usually very expensive and difficult to build up to cover all geographical regions where end users reside.
Thus what is needed in the industry are methods and apparatus that provide voice communications over the Internet that do not have the drawbacks described above. The objective of the present invention is to implement the efficient VOIP technology in the existing network infrastructure inexpensively and effectively to serve any user at any location.